ssible time
to say it. It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have
said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has
ever been said since the world began. It has seemed to me the most
literal, and perhaps the most practical, truth that has been said since
the world began.

It goes straight to the point about people. It gives one one's
definition of goodness both for one's self and for others. It gives one
a program for action.

Except in our more joyous and free moments, we assume that when people
do us a wrong, they know what they are about. They look at the right
thing to do and they look at the wrong one, and they choose the wrong
one because they like it better. Nine people out of ten one meets in the
streets coming out of church on Sunday morning, if one asked them the
question plainly, "Do you ever do wrong when you know it is wrong?"
would say that they did. If you ask them what a sin is, they will tell
you that it is something you do when you know you ought not to do it.

But The Man Himself, in speaking of the most colossal sin that has ever
been committed, seemed to think that when men committed a sin, it was
because they did not really see what it was that they were doing. They
did what they wanted to do at the moment. They did not do what they
would have wished they had done in twenty years.

I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had done in
twenty years--twenty years, twenty days, twenty minutes, or twenty
seconds, according to the time the action takes to get ripe.

It would be far more true and more to the point instead of scolding or
admiring Mr. Rockefeller's skilled labour at getting too rich, to point
out mildly that he has done something that in the long-run he would not
have wanted to do; that he has lacked the social imagination for a great
permanently successful business. His sin has consisted in his not taking
pains to act accurately and permanently, in his not concentrating his
mind and finding out what he really wanted to do. It would seem to be
better and truer and more accurate in the tremendous crisis of our
modern life to judge Mr. Rockefeller, not as monster of wickedness, but
merely as an inefficient, morally underwitted man. There are things that
he has not thought of that every one else has.

We see that in all those qualities that really go to make a great
business house in a great nation John D. Rockefeller stands as the